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White House Memo
The president’s vilification of political opponents and journalists seeds the ground for threats of prosecution, imprisonment and deportation unlike any modern president has made.
By Peter Baker
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, is covering his sixth presidency. He reported from the Aspen Security Forum.
July 16, 2025, 10:08 a.m. ET
When the Pentagon decided not to send anyone to this week’s Aspen Security Forum, an annual bipartisan gathering of national security professionals in the Colorado mountains, President Trump’s appointees explained that they would not participate in discussions with people who subscribe to the “evil of globalism.”
After all the evils that the U.S. military has fought, this may be the first time in its history that it has put globalization on its enemies list. But it is simply following the example of Mr. Trump. Last week, he denounced a reporter as a “very evil person” for asking a question he did not like. This week, he declared that Democrats are “an evil group of people.”
“Evil” is a word getting a lot of airtime in the second Trump term. It is not enough anymore to dislike a journalistic inquiry or disagree with an opposing philosophy. Anyone viewed as critical of the president or insufficiently deferential is wicked. The Trump administration’s efforts to achieve its policy goals are not just an exercise in governance but a holy mission against forces of darkness.
The characterization seeds the ground to justify all sorts of actions that would normally be considered extreme or out of bounds. If Mr. Trump’s adversaries are not just rivals but villains, then he can rationalize going further than any president has in modern times. Last month, he told a cabinet secretary to consider throwing her Biden administration predecessor in prison because of his immigration policy. Last weekend, Mr. Trump said he might strip Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship for the crime of criticizing him.
Demonization, of course, has been at the core of Mr. Trump’s politics since he took the national stage in 2015 to announce his first successful presidential campaign and disparaged many immigrants crossing the border without permission as “rapists” and vowed to block all Muslims from entering the country. His rallies during that campaign rang with “lock her up” chants aimed at his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
But in returning to power, Mr. Trump has been more focused on rooting out the “enemy from within,” as he put it during last year’s campaign. He has devoted enormous energy in his second term to prosecuting perceived enemies, purging career officials deemed disloyal and destroying what he calls “the deep state” that he believes thwarted his policies last time and then persecuted him through criminal prosecutions after he left office.
During the first six months of his first term in 2017, according to a search of the Factbase compendium of his speeches, Mr. Trump regularly used the word “evil” to describe terrorists, immigrants, Nazis and bigots, much as other presidents might have. He used it in a domestic context only once, when complaining about news coverage. In the nearly six months of his second term, he has used it 11 times to describe Democrats or journalists.
Mr. Trump has said that former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was “an evil guy who wasn’t very smart” and ran a “very evil regime” surrounded by advisers and prosecutors who were also “so bad and so evil, so corrupt.”
“I knew that running was very dangerous, because I knew how evil these people were,” Mr. Trump said of Democrats on May 12, during an interview on Air Force One with Sean Hannity of Fox News. “I knew how they cheat, they steal, they lie. They’re a horrible group of people.”
Speaking with visiting foreign ministers in the Oval Office on June 27, he said: “We had a president that was incompetent. We had bad people circulating around this desk, this beautiful Resolute Desk. They had, I guess, evil intentions. They would — you couldn’t be that stupid. I mean, they had evil intentions.”
This is a level of presidential discourse unusual in modern times. President George H.W. Bush once apologized for describing his challengers as “bozos” because it was seen as beneath the dignity of the office. His son, President George W. Bush, famously used the word “evildoers,” but he was describing terrorists who had hijacked airplanes and slaughtered Americans, not political opponents or reporters.
The Trump era has changed the standards, and his critics at times have followed his lead. Robert De Niro has called Mr. Trump an “evil” person. During the presidential campaign last year, Jill Biden used the word in criticizing Mr. Trump for disparaging military veterans, which he has denied. “His own chief of staff said he called P.O.W.s and those who died in war ‘losers’ and ‘suckers,’” Dr. Biden told an audience in Georgia. “He’s evil.” Discussing Mr. Trump’s nomination of his own former lawyer to be a federal judge, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, said last week that “the motives are evil ones.”
Mr. Trump’s allies complain that he has been unfairly targeted by partisan prosecutors, vilified as a fascist, a Nazi and a dictator, and compared to some of history’s most horrific villains like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Benito Mussolini.
Yet lately, it is Mr. Trump’s own base that is seeing evil in the president’s circle as some of his allies erupt over the administration’s failure to release files that they assume would prove a broader conspiracy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
“Evil forces are trying to take full control of the Trump administration and we must FIGHT to STOP them!!” Alex Jones, the far-right conspiracy theorist, wrote on social media.
But a president’s words are different than anyone else’s. They carry power and set the tone for national debate. More than any recent predecessor, Mr. Trump has encouraged the notion that his presidency is a battle of good versus evil, embracing images of himself as a king, a pope and Superman.
Those who question him, then, must be on the other side of that binary equation. When the president visited Texas last week to show concern over deadly floods there, a local CBS News reporter noted that families were upset that warnings had not gone out sooner, which might have saved loved ones who died.
“What do you say to those families?” she asked.
“I don’t know who you are, but only a very evil person would ask a question like that,” Mr. Trump replied.
At a White House Faith Office luncheon on Monday, he again excoriated Mr. Biden’s team. “We’re against an evil group of people, and they’re very smart, very smart,” he said. “He’s not, but they are. They took over the Oval Office. They actually took over the Oval Office.”
Mr. Trump has demonstrated willingness to use power against those he considers evil. On a single day two weeks ago, he threatened to arrest two political rivals and deport an estranged ally who had angered him.
Asked about the possibility that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York mayor, might try to stop immigration arrests, Mr. Trump said, “Well, then, we’ll have to arrest him.”
Asked whether Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary under Mr. Biden, should be imprisoned because so many immigrants crossed the border, Mr. Trump told his own homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to “take a look at it,” suggesting that a policy disagreement merited criminal prosecution. Similarly, asked if he would deport the billionaire Elon Musk, who has broken with him, Mr. Trump said, “We’ll have to take a look.”
Mr. Musk was not the only one Mr. Trump threatened to throw out of the country in recent days, the kind of threat presidents do not typically make out of political spite. Last weekend, he lashed out at Ms. O’Donnell, the actress and longtime nemesis who had moved to Ireland just before he resumed office. He did not call her “evil,” but he did call her a “Threat to Humanity” on social media and added, ”Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.”
Such inflammatory threats would have been considered shocking in another era but passed with little notice because they have become business as usual under Mr. Trump. In the case of Ms. O’Donnell in particular, some strategists in Washington assumed it was an attempt to distract from the Epstein meltdown that is damaging Mr. Trump with his base and refocus ire on external enemies.
The Pentagon decision on Monday to pull a dozen officials from the Aspen Security Forum demonstrated how far the vilification of political discourse has trickled down from the Oval Office. Once a year, the forum brings together current and former government officials from both parties for relentlessly earnest, wonky and civil on-the-record discussions of issues like supply chains, artificial intelligence, China and the Middle East.
The leafy campus where the forum is held is usually teeming with secretaries of state and defense, national security advisers, C.I.A. directors, senators, ambassadors and journalists. Among the scheduled participants this year are Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state under the second Mr. Bush, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to Mr. Biden. They do not all agree with one another, which is the point.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, his advisers attended the forum at times to make the case for their administration’s policies and to talk with others to hear their ideas, including Mike Pompeo, then the C.I.A. director, and Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence. But the Pentagon pullout this week reflected an unwillingness in the second term to engage in dialogue with anyone other than Trump loyalists.
“The Department of Defense has no interest in legitimizing an organization that has invited former officials who have been the architects of chaos abroad and failure at home,” the Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told Just the News, a Trump-friendly site.
“They are antithetical to the ‘America First’ values of this administration,” she added. “Senior representatives of the Department of Defense will no longer be participating in an event that promotes the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country and hatred for the president of the United States.”
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.
